is privacy dead?

The recent flap over our government scanning for terrorist calling patterns in phone records and the ongoing issues of identity theft make us all pause to consider our own personal privacy.

In 1997, Time Magazine declared “The Death of Privacy“. Most privacy discussions these days focus either on “Big Brother” tracking and collating your activities or on the ease with which crooks can steal your identity.

But it is also interesting to know how much can be learned about you by people who are just curious — neighbors, family members, co-workers, potential employers, or potential mates! If you are an active member of society, you leave a digital trail that anyone can pick up:

START WITH A CAR LICENSE PLATE

Let’s start with the barest piece of information and take it from there: Let’s assume that someone sees me getting into my car. They know nothing else about me but the license plate of the car I drive.

They go to www.publicdata.com where, for a cost of pennies per search, they use the license plate number to lookup who I am, my address and how much I paid for the car, the car’s Vehicle ID Number, and whether the car is financed. With one click they find all the other cars registered at this address and have insight into who I live with. They see that there are more cars than people at this address and discover we have an interest in owning collector cars.

With my name and address in hand, they look up my drivers license number and my birthdate. They see any other licensed drivers at my address (do I have teenage kids?) and see their birthdates as well. They also look up my property tax payment, see the value of my house and know when I bought or financed it. They see that I am a registered voter, and check whether I have any professional licenses, whether I am named in any criminal or civil suits, or whether I am a sex offender. All this in one place, instantly, for about 10 cents.

Next stop is www.yellowpages.com to use my street address to look up my phone number. This shows all the phone numbers at this address and all the other people listed at this address.

THEN USE THE PUBLIC FACTS TO BUILD A PROFILE

Next, they type my phone number into a search at www.google.com. This confirms the people at my home address, provides a link to a satellite picture of my home (Oh! Look! A pool!) and reveals any web pages where I may have published my home phone number. They would see that in the late 1990′s I worked out of my home as a freelance public relations person.

They type my name (in quotes) into the Google search engine or one of the services (like www.metacrawler.com) that collates the results from several search engines. Here they would find that I run a company, that I am a member of several car clubs (now the old cars make sense), that I am on a board at Brown University, etc. Clicking “images” would show pictures of me at various events, as well as pictures of my house, cars, and even a video of our dogs — some of which were taken by others and posted on their own websites. They will even find a reproduction of my signature. (Smart of me to have that out there, isn’t it?) Clicking on the “Groups” search in Google, they would see that I am mentioned in a couple newsgroup discussions relating to Brown (favorably, thank goodness!)

Going to the Federal Elections Commission at www.fec.gov, they find that I contributed $260 to John McCain in 2000 and they draw some conclusions about my political views. (Despite my vast contribution, the other guy won!)

Of course, in Texas, relationships are everything, so they type my name into a fairly new website called ZoomInfo at www.zoominfo.com. This website collates web information (like the search engines), then automatically analyses each page to make educated guesses about the business relationships. In my case, they would learn about the organizations I am involved in, my company, and other people who have worked for me.

AND VOILA!

Keep in mind that my entire profile was generated for little or no cost, without my permission, without my social security number, perfectly legally, and starting with NOTHING but my car license plate.

Makes you think twice before making that colorful hand gesture to another driver, doesn’t it?